Just Like Home(64)

And then she’s on the ground next to her bicycle, her hands plunged wrist-deep into the cold mulch, a crushing ache shooting up through her tailbone. Brandon stands over her. His eyes are glassy and a red flush blooms high on his cheeks and across his throat. His arms are red too, a livid pre-bruise kind of red where she’d clutched at him. He’s breathing hard, his mouth still open, his hands held out as if to ward her off.

“What the hell, Vee,” he breathes.

“I thought—”

“What the hell,” he says again, loud this time. He’s standing over her, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, his eyes dark with growing anger. Vera wonders if that’s it, the darkness in his glare—if that’s the foulness her father wanted her to keep away from. “Why would you kiss me right now? Why would you do that?”

The conviction that compelled her to kiss him in the first place is gone, leaving her hollow. Shame starts to trickle into that empty space like urine down a pant leg, a hot and uncontrollable flood of it that she doesn’t know how to escape. “I don’t know, I thought you wanted … I wanted to help?”

None of the words she picks are the right ones, and his face broadcasts just how wrong she is. He aims a vicious kick at her fallen bike, his sneaker meeting the metal frame with a rattle that makes Vera jump. “My dad’s gone, and you really just—you wanted to help? Don’t ever help me again, Vera.”

The way he says her name has more venom in it than when he’d said fuck you. She’s never heard her name sound like that before, like it’s the worst bad word. And then he’s gone, just like before, pushing his bike back up toward the road, leaving Vera on the ground.

She pulls her hands out of the muck. They’re filthy and cold, but at least she’s not bleeding this time. The hot shame in her burns hotter as Brandon’s voice echoes through her mind. What’s wrong with you?

Nothing’s wrong with me, she thinks, and the burning shame crystallizes into fierce anger. Who does Brandon think he is? Vera is the one who took the risk, getting so close to him even though she knew what was inside him. Even though she knew he was going rotten and slick and cold inside, just like the filth on her hands.

And Brandon just proved her father right, didn’t he? She saw it mushing around behind his eyes when he said her name with so much hate, saw the way it made him kick out at her bike. He could have been kicking her just as easily. Maybe, she thinks with growing alarm, he’d meant to kick her. Maybe he just missed.

Vera rides toward home as fast as she rode away from it. The wind whips her hair around her face, tying it into intricate knots that will take forever to undo. Fine, she thinks fiercely. Let her hair tangle. It doesn’t matter.

Part of her hopes she’ll overtake Brandon on the road, hopes she’ll have the chance to kick out at him. Let him find out how it feels to be humiliated and yelled at by someone who’s supposed to be your friend. But of course, she doesn’t see him anywhere. He’s long gone, probably at home already, telling his mother to call the police. As if that’ll do any good. As if moms ever listen anyway.

She leaves her bike on the front lawn and storms inside, slamming the door. Her bedroom door is open, welcoming, waiting for her—but she pauses with her hand on the knob and looks at the next door over.

The door to the basement.

The key around her neck rings like a tuning fork, and the frequency of its vibrations starts a hum that cuts through her crystalline anger. She could go down there. Her father won’t be home from work, not yet. She could go down there and see it up close, the thing her father brought inside. And then wouldn’t Brandon be sorry that he was so mean to her?

But before she can make a decision—before the thing that still has its fingers in her brain can make a decision—there are footsteps on the porch, and the door opens, and she hears her own name.

“Vera? What happened to you?”

She whips around to look at her father. She can’t see her own face, but the way her father’s eyes lock onto hers, she is sure that he can feel the furious hum that’s still filling her.

“Nothing,” she says. “I was down by the creek. I slipped and fell into the mud.”

They stand there in silence for a long time, long enough for everything in Vera to go quiet. Almost. There’s still an echo of that hum.

Her father takes a few steps toward her, and just like that, he’s between her and the basement door. His eyes dart back and forth, left-right-left-right-left. He’s looking between her eyes, looking at her so closely that the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. His nostrils twitch.

In this moment, Vera is acutely aware of how much mud is on her hands.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me anything else?” he asks.

He’s speaking softly, so softly that Vera’s mother wouldn’t be able to hear even if she was standing in the next room. It’s not easy to hear conversations throughout the house anyway. It’s a quiet house.

Still—Vera can see that her father is being careful. He’s being very, very careful.

“I’m sure,” she says, just as careful. Just as quiet. “There’s nothing else. I just fell. I should probably wash up,” she adds, holding up her hands, making sure he sees that she isn’t trying to hide them from him.

Her father’s gaze drops to the filth on her skin. The intensity in his eyes does not diminish. After a slow, steady breath, he nods. “You should,” he murmurs.